Matt Welch is a magazine editor and writer. On The Bob Zadek Show he appeared as editor-in-chief of Reason magazine and, in a later episode, as editor at large at the same magazine. In the 2021 episode Bob Zadek also described him as co-author, with Nick Gillespie, of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America, and as a customer of government-run schools living under the control of the New York City school system. Parents Voting With Their Kids’ Feet (2021)
A Libertarian Plan (2010)
Welch’s first appearance in the excerpts was on the episode “A Libertarian Plan,” where Zadek introduced him as editor-in-chief of Reason magazine and said he was published by a nonprofit foundation based in LA called the Reason Foundation. Welch told listeners they could find the magazine at reason.com, that a subscription brought 11 issues a year for 20 dollars, and that the foundation’s think-tank style work was at reason.org. A Libertarian Plan (2010)
Zadek opened the episode by contrasting two views of federal power: a quotation he attributed to Representative Pete Stark, that there are no constitutional limits to what the federal government can do, and James Madison’s statement in Federalist 45 that the powers delegated to the federal government are few and defined. Zadek said that honoring Madison’s view rather than Stark’s would make it possible to balance the budget without interfering with entitlements and without raising taxes, and named the topic of the show as how to balance the federal government’s budget without raising taxes.
Asked for examples of cuts, Welch said the first move was to get the government out of the housing market, asking why there was an entity into which 150 billion dollars of bailout money had already been thrown in terms of Fannie and Freddie, which he said guarantee trillions of dollars worth of mortgages. He argued that other countries without a similar institution have the same if not higher level of homeownership, that unwinding it was a complicated trick, and that it was at the root of the financial and economic crisis. Zadek added that Fannie and Freddie guaranteeing mortgages was a relatively new federal activity and that for most of the country’s history people had been able to buy houses and pay a fair price for a mortgage without any federal guarantee.
Welch said the pain from getting the government out of the mortgage guarantee business would be felt by Wall Street companies that thought the government would back their gambling and by people who used their own house and financed on it like an ATM machine or a casino, and that prices of houses would go down, which is when homeownership goes up. He then turned to agricultural payouts, saying more than 20 billion dollars a year is spent on direct payouts to the richest country in the world’s richest farmers, to Monsanto, to big agribusiness, Archer Daniels Midland, and that this money directly impoverishes third-world farmers. Zadek agreed and said that closing down the Department of Agriculture would make everything at the supermarket cheaper the next day, naming milk and eggs.
Welch next proposed abolishing the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, which he said was launched to allocate scarce broadcast spectrum but which now tries every day to come up with new ways to censor, deciding what can be said on live television and requiring long studies of minority and female ownership of second-tier radio stations in mid-markets. Zadek said that if everyone in the FCC were fired and the FCC closed down there would be zero disruption in any American’s life and zero disruption in the economic marketplace, except that everything would be cheaper, and joked about who would regulate wardrobe malfunctions.
Welch raised dismantling the Davis-Bacon Act, which Zadek said was done in 1931 to keep Blacks out of the government contracting market and named Bacon as a Long Island congressman. Welch said contractors have to pay the prevailing wage and cannot competitively bid, that the law uses public money to reward union friends, and that it is a hidden tax costing incredible amounts of money, citing living wage ordinances on hotels near LAX as an example in labor-dominated states like California. He also said the stimulus could be repealed, that 300 billion dollars in unspent stimulus money remained, that it had not come close to delivering what was promised, and that it was promised based on theoretical multipliers saying a dollar spent would bring 1.60 dollars in economic benefits. His final proposal was to bring the troops home, saying the Cold War is over, that there should be no more troops in Germany, Korea or anywhere else, and that the United States was subsidizing Europe and Asia; Zadek noted this was the position of Gary Johnson, who would be his guest the following week.
Executive overreach and the Bergdahl controversy (2014)
In a 2014 episode otherwise devoted to Matt Zwolinski, Zadek played a recorded clip of Welch from a television show supported by Reason called The Independents, which Zadek said aired on Fox every weekday evening, describing it as Welch showing almost uncontrolled rage at the Obama administration ignoring the law on Bergdahl. Matt Zwolinski on Bleeding Heart Libertarianism (2014)
In the clip, Welch said the president was the constitutional scholar elected to restore balance to the runaway executive branch, that he was disregarding the statutory authority of the executive branch to inform Congress 30 days’ notice instead of five hours before or after the fact, and that this showed how far the president and his supporters had come unmoored from the basis of his presidency, which Welch described as rolling back the Bush-Cheney expansion of executive power. Welch called it egregious and said that people shrugging at it, including the president’s supporters like Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker saying it was illegal but, showed what kind of poison partisan mindsets have.
Zadek’s own framing of the controversy, in the segments preceding the clip, was that Congress had enacted a statute, which the president signed, requiring any president who intended to release prisoners from Guantanamo to give certain members of Congress 30 days’ advance notice, that there was no wiggle room and no exceptions, and that the Obama administration simply ignored that law. He said no person, regardless of position in government, is above the law, and that the country is a country of laws, not of men. He also said the accumulation of power in the executive at the expense of the legislative and to some degree the judicial was for him perhaps the most frightening attribute of the Obama administration, that the Bush administration was to a fair degree guilty of this as well but that Obama was doing it on steroids, and that as the executive accumulates power it starts to feel as if we are governed by a king.
Parents voting with their kids’ feet (2021)
Welch returned in a 2021 Labor Day episode on education, introduced by Zadek as editor at large at Reason magazine and as the author of a recent Reason article whose headline Zadek quoted as “Families are fleeing government-run schools.” Parents Voting With Their Kids’ Feet (2021)
Zadek framed the episode around a stress test of public education: that once in a while important structural elements of society get stress-tested, that this was happening in education over the past year and in the coming months, and that the COVID pandemic had people asking who gets to decide, how they get to decide, where the money goes, and what the roles of parents, unions, government and the CDC are. He said these were questions not much asked in a non-pandemic environment, and that the episode would ask whether basic assumptions about the structure of providing education to children are correct. The episode summary states that Zadek and Welch discussed parents increasingly voting with their feet by leaving government-run schools, that the pandemic revealed the inflexibility of the one-size-fits-all model and the influence of teachers’ unions, and that this led to a surge in support for school choice and backpack funding, where money follows the student.
Across episodes
The excerpts show Welch on the show in 2010, 2014 and 2021, but the 2014 appearance is a recorded clip rather than a live interview, and the three episodes address different subjects — the federal budget, executive overreach, and education — so the excerpts show no development of a single argument across them. The one continuity the sources state is institutional: Zadek’s description of Welch’s employer, Reason magazine, in 2010 as editor-in-chief and in 2021 as editor at large.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state where Welch was born or educated, when he joined Reason, or what he did before or after his time there beyond the titles Zadek gives him. They do not give the outcome of the Bergdahl controversy, the name of the statute Zadek describes, or any response by the Obama administration to Welch’s criticism. They also do not report what Welch said in the 2021 episode itself, since the excerpt ends before his remarks begin.
Episodes
2 appearances, 2010–2021.
- A Libertarian Plan (2010) — Balancing the federal budget through constitutional limits. Editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine
- Parents Voting With Their Kids’ Feet (2021) — Families fleeing government-run schools and school choice. Editor at large at Reason magazine